The present invention relates to enclosures desired to be secure against having the contents thereof revealed as a result of tampering therewith that results in intrusion therein or to the removal of some or all of the those contents therefrom, or both, and, more particularly, to magnetic devices for providing such security.
Various kinds of enclosures are used to store various kinds of items that an owner or user wants secure against being revealed to, or removed by, others especially without the owner or user gaining knowledge of such revelations or removals having occurred. One example is an enclosure for keeping selected data stored in a computer or other device memory secret. To do so, such data must be protected against its being extracted from the memory, or from being intercepted from transmissions thereof during use, in a manner which would result in the contents thereof being revealed. Typically, in aid of such an effort, the data is encrypted before storage in the memory or before transmission to better protect the contents thereof from being revealed.
Such arrangements require the use of encryption and decryption keys as the basis for encrypting the data and for decrypting the coded data result which are often kept in nonvolatile memories in the form of integrated circuits stored in an enclosure. These enclosures are subject to many kinds of attacks by those interested in gaining unauthorized access to the contents of the data stored therein. Thus, there is a desire to provide an arrangement for detecting any intrusions into such enclosures with little additional apparatus and, in at least some situations, to erase such stored data from the nonvolatile memory upon an intrusion.